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A word to panicky parents: Take a tip from my mother and teach your kids not to eat their stuff.
Yes, the fearmongers among us are back to portraying the sales slip for your kiddies’ Christmas playthings as the next best thing to a juvenile death certificate. Not only will the wobbly bits insecurely attached to the kiddies’ gewgaws be sucked down their throats, causing them to turn blue until their heads explode, but the tutti-frutti-flavored high lead paint frosting on their Chinese-made playthings will reduce them to slavering zombies at the first lick. They’ve given us fair warning that any kid’s toy box is as good as their coffin unless we hype our vigilance and, by golly, do something about it.
Weeeeeeeellllllll … I’m not so sure about that. Were the hazards the doomsayers caution against half the hazard they want us to think they are, there wouldn’t be a day care in the country without an attached morgue and mortuary. Methinks portraying a visit to Toys “R” Us as a near-death experience stretches credibility tighter than an overwrought shopper’s credit limit. American kids are no closer to the endangered species list than ’skeeters and houseflies, but by the standards of today, it can be seen as a tribute to the resiliency of our species that those of us who predate Public Citizen and the Consumer Product Safety Commission managed to live long enough to reproduce and nurture our young.
With the leaded paint, seatbeltless cars and ashtrays on every table, not a one of us should have been breathing past puberty, and even if we managed, considering our proclivity for bean shooters, slingshots and the iconic Red Ryder BB gun, we should have stumbled unseeing into a very dim future.
But since nobody thought to mention it, we never gave it a thought. We had tall trees, fast bikes and gravity to keep us amused. We wore mercurochrome like war paint and could always pass the time with a scab or two to pick when Pastor Hanson’s sermon ran long or while in the clinic waiting room as one sibling or another was being patched up and put back into service.
We were frostbitten in the winter, sunburned in the summer and in spring and fall risked “catching our death” by ditching boots, gloves and jacket at the first glimmer of sunshine. We smashed our fingers learning to swing Dad’s hammer and burned them learning to light matches so we could learn to smoke.
We had water fights, snowball fights and ordinary smack ‘em in the face/punch ‘em in the belly fights. A kid learned to use a wad of Charmin to stop a nosebleed and an ice cube to shrink a fat lip well before he learned the multiplication tables through 12. We learned that too many little green apples meant a memorable case of the Hershey squirts and there was more to wine than stomped grapes aging in a mason jar behind the garage.
Football was played without a helmet, baseball with real wooden bats — and at least once a season, an overexcited batter would let loose the Louisville Slugger halfway through the follow-through and launch the lumber into the catcher’s face, sending the lad to Doc Poston for a few stitches or Doc Frisch for a new, removable front tooth.
Hardly a week would pass without one of us sporting a cast, sling or finger splint, all the while harboring a secret morbid envy for the pirate’s eyepatch issued to the kid who caught a hot line drive with one of his baby blues.
In spite of it all, save for a couple of contemporaries who perished from now routinely curable ills, we all passed from pre-adolescence to puberty and adulthood, albeit with a few scars and the occasional missing body part, even though every one of us got a .22 for our 12th birthday.
As far as today’s car-seated, sanitized, safety-certified youngster is concerned, I’d advise a simple fix to avert the doomsayers predictions of disaster … take the toy truck out of the kid’s mouth and give him a Twinkie instead. If he’s learned any manners, he’ll thank you for it.
Contact Jerome Christenson at jchristenson@winonadailynews.com
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Rawhide wrote on Dec 25, 2007 8:12 AM: